Metro was the official 'design language' of the tile phone interface, and was widely promoted up until August this year as the tile interface for W8. Then MS ran into trademark trouble with Metro AG, a German company. So they sent out missives to stop using that term and flirted with the term "Modern" for the UI. At some point they then started calling the UI simply "Windows 8", or sometimes "Microsoft Design Language".

So, it's even more confusing than what I said, but there was no "rumor". This happened, there are numerous press releases and memos. It's a marketing clusterfark because even tech reporters are still using every farking term above to refer to the tile interface.

CmndrFish:Windows RT shouldn't even exist. You can get very competitive battery life and better performance out of a Clovertrail (the new Atom) processor.

It seriously has no point in existing. Just dump the platform entirely and give everybody who made the mistake of buying a Surface RT a few hundred off of a (hypothetical) Clovertrail Surface or Surface Pro and be done with it.

Microsoft does not invest in common sense. Microsoft just does not get it. With Gates, Microsoft was at their zenith. Gates understood the product. Ballmer isn't a geek; he can never understand

The thing that absolutely kills me with Microsoft marketing is they're more concerned with selling their image than selling the product. The image they sell though is so cringe worthy cheesy you can't help but associate with their products even if they're good or not.

You know how Sinbad spent his entire career trying to be a black comedian even though he was really a white comedian? That's Microsoft.

Dwedit:By the time Windows NT 4 came out, it was pretty much compatible with Windows 95.

It isn't that the NT4 was really more forgiving than NT3.51, it was that more programs used documented APIs by that point as opposed to thumping hardware directly, which results in a General Protection Fault.

CmndrFish:Windows RT shouldn't even exist. You can get very competitive battery life and better performance out of a Clovertrail (the new Atom) processor.

It seriously has no point in existing. Just dump the platform entirely and give everybody who made the mistake of buying a Surface RT a few hundred off of a (hypothetical) Clovertrail Surface or Surface Pro and be done with it.

All MS really needed to do was figure out how to deploy a x86 tablet with some basic 3D support for the price of a iPad instead of an ultrabook. You could run all your classic games on it and have it run the work related x86 applications as well. A couple SD cards with the games and one with the work stuff. Instead they're deploying a lower end crippleware platform and an upper end platform whose price makes me go "fark it, I'll just buy a laptop."

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats:This isn't Microsoft's fault. It's shiatty salespeople...Microsoft's goal is not to overtake iOS, it's to get a toe-hold in the tablet market.

Besides, I have a feeling that once the execs and salespeople get a good look at the Surface Pro, the Enterprise market will start driving towards it instead of the iPad.

Damn, just tear up that ticket, man, your horse is dying out there.

It's pretty sad to see people defending Microsoft so vehemently when they're dying slow death with that throwback Ballmer at the helm. Did you notice how 3 years ago there was no "tablet market" for these me-toos in which to dump their crappy, user-hostile products? Face it: only a longtime MS dev or "edgy" anti-Apple reverse-fanboi would possibly defend them, because the Microsoft strategy is--and essentially always has been--sifting through the proverbial dumpsters behind Apple's R+D. All they have is a few more years of slowing momentum before they die. Just let it go.

BullBearMS:The problem here is that Microsoft cares much more about what is good for Microsoft than it cares about what is good for their customers. This shows massive contempt for their users and leads to piss poor decisions such as:

I agree with everything you said, but I would say MS cares about what it THINKS is good for MS. Making the customers happy and turning a profit should be the top two things any company that cares about its future does.

It's so bad that I have to wonder about the internal decision making at a company that would allow such a dismal launch. Is it all Ballmer's heavy handed and head-in-the-sand strategy, or is it that they are caught up in GroupThink and seriously can't smell their own shiat?

ongbok:MrEricSir: If you can't win customers because you have a good product, trick them into buying it by confusing the shiat out of them.

This is not a new strategy for Microsoft.

How did Microsoft trick anybody with the RT? It has been clearly put out, for those who care to do 5 minutes of research, that the RT was a typical tablet and the Pro was the true Microsoft OS that would be able to behave like a laptop.

nope, not even close to clear enough. it has been windows __ for years and you can't expect people to know that THIS time it actually means something.... then it is a random set of letters, not "tablet" or "lite" or "express" just RT which obviously means something to someone who doesn't even know the difference between word and windows.

it was/is a mistake, saying otherwise shows a great misunderstanding of the market.

ongbok:MrEricSir: If you can't win customers because you have a good product, trick them into buying it by confusing the shiat out of them.

This is not a new strategy for Microsoft.

How did Microsoft trick anybody with the RT? It has been clearly put out, for those who care to do 5 minutes of research, that the RT was a typical tablet and the Pro was the true Microsoft OS that would be able to behave like a laptop.

If you're looking at products in a store, and they have a bunch of tablets right next to the PC's, both of which that say "Windows" and whose Start screens look idenetical, I can easily see why someone would make the assumption.

cman:CmndrFish: Windows RT shouldn't even exist. You can get very competitive battery life and better performance out of a Clovertrail (the new Atom) processor.

It seriously has no point in existing. Just dump the platform entirely and give everybody who made the mistake of buying a Surface RT a few hundred off of a (hypothetical) Clovertrail Surface or Surface Pro and be done with it.

Microsoft does not invest in common sense. Microsoft just does not get it. With Gates, Microsoft was at their zenith. Gates understood the product. Ballmer isn't a geek; he can never understand

Apparently not, since they really could have also moved the entirety of Windows Phone to x86 (Atom again) when they re-did the kernel between WP7 and WP8. Given that the existing ecosystem was so small for WP7 it would have been a great time to do it, and then you could have literally just had a checkbox to compile a .NET program for Windows Phone. This whole platform transition away from the desktop really shouldn't be that painful, we have the technology!

Hell, is it Intel that is your problem? Because AMD has a very similar platform named Fusion. Once again, what's the deal?

This should have been an easy slam dunk but Microsoft had to go spill RISC in its CISC world.

MrEricSir:If you can't win customers because you have a good product, trick them into buying it by confusing the shiat out of them.

This is not a new strategy for Microsoft.

How did Microsoft trick anybody with the RT? It has been clearly put out, for those who care to do 5 minutes of research, that the RT was a typical tablet and the Pro was the true Microsoft OS that would be able to behave like a laptop.

Windows RT is the most godawful, wrongly formed name for an operating system in existence. What does it even FARKING MEAN? Run Time? That's stupid. Is it to call back to Windows CE that NO ONE CARES ABOUT?

It's just goddamn embarrassing to have such major company fail so hard at just creating a name that just isn't completely idiotic. It isn't hard. MetroOS, SurfaceOS, Windows Metro, any of those would be less dumb.

Windows RT shouldn't even exist. You can get very competitive battery life and better performance out of a Clovertrail (the new Atom) processor.

It seriously has no point in existing. Just dump the platform entirely and give everybody who made the mistake of buying a Surface RT a few hundred off of a (hypothetical) Clovertrail Surface or Surface Pro and be done with it.

jake_lex:This is exactly why Apple doesn't call what runs on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch "OS X", and even why Google keeps Android on phones and tablets and has another name entirely for what runs on laptop devices, Chrome OS.

You'd think Microsoft would have realized that.

Actually one complaint about the IPad when it first came out was from people who were led to believe that it would be able to replace there laptops and do everything a laptop was able to do.

Hand Banana:So people who buy an OS called Windows expect it to run Windows software? Who would have imagined...

5 minutes of research into what they were buying and they would have realized that maybe the RT model wasn't what they were looking for and waiting for the Pro model would have been better suited for them.

The most sensible thing to do since A) They wanted the Windows name in the OS name, and B) It only runs Metro apps and not legacy programs would be to call the OS: Windows Metro. Of course putting Ballmer and sensible together is like putting oil and water together. WTF is Windows RT anyway? Windows ReTard?

TheBeastOfYuccaFlats:Q12013 the Surface Pro comes out and does exactly what this Dell doorknob is complaining about, but that would mean that salespeople wouldn't get their pre-xmas commission checks.

It would have been nice if Microsoft had included an x86->ARM binary translator. I used an x86->Alpha translator (FX!32) on my DEC Alpha workstation back in the day and it ran apps at about 90% of native speed*. Given that we've had a decade of research into JITC compilers and x86 virtual machines, I'd expect translators to be even better.

Sorry MS, you have to beat Apple via some other game. Giving people access to a huge library of Windows app was one of them. But you had to fark that up, too.

This is exactly why Apple doesn't call what runs on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch "OS X", and even why Google keeps Android on phones and tablets and has another name entirely for what runs on laptop devices, Chrome OS.